This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution License (3.0) Religion and Gender | ISSN: 1878-5417 | www.religionandgender.org | Igitur publishing Vol. 4, no. 1 (2014), 86-89 | URN:NBN:NL:UI:10-1-114509 Review of Thomas A. Robinson and Lanette D. Ruff, Out of the Mouths of Babes: Girl Evangelists in the Flapper Era (Religion in America Series), Oxford: Oxford University Press 2012, 3 + 240 pp., ISBN 978-0-19-979087-6 BY TRAVIS WARREN COOPER, INDIANA UNIVERSITY, USA Out of the Mouths of Babes is the joint project of religious studies scholar, Thomas Robinson, and sociologist, Lanette Ruff. Robinson’s academic focus is the history of North American Pentecostalism while Ruff specialises in the fields of family, violence, and women’s studies. The book uniformly incorporates these two perspectives into a coherent and compelling whole, focusing on young girl evangelists of the American interwar period who literally embodied the ide- ological tensions of the era in the ways they publicly presented themselves, dressed, and spoke. These children, or rather, the controversies surrounding their ministries, were a site of social, cultural, religious, and gender tensions (2012: 12). In the opening chapters, the authors introduce the Roaring Twenties and Dirty Thirties, set the temporal and cultural context of the child phenomenon (Chapter 1), and describe the competing ideological and religious currents of the times (Chapters 2 and 3). The book considers the gendered aspects of reviv- alist evangelicalism (Chapter 4) and details the points in which the flapper phe- nomenon and girl evangelist coincide and diverge (Chapters 5 through 7). The mid-portion of Out of the Mouths of Babes shifts to the girl preachers them- selves, and investigates their identities as children (Chapter 9) along with their awkward transition to adulthood (Chapter 10) before turning to evangelistic methodology – including the ritual of preaching and the use of radio and print advertising in promotion of revivalist endeavours (Chapters 11 through 13). The last section of the book follows the abrupt decline of the child preachers (Chap- ters 14 and 15) and in a final chapter situates the phenomenon as a product of four contributing factors: 1) burgeoning Pentecostalism, which confirmed, to